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29 lines
2.2 KiB
Plaintext
29 lines
2.2 KiB
Plaintext
title: TiddlyWikiArchitecture
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modifier: JeremyRuston
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tags: docs internals
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!! Overview
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The heart of TiddlyWiki can be seen as an extensible representation transformation engine. Given the text of a tiddler and its associated ContentType, the engine can produce a rendering of the tiddler in a new ContentType. Furthermore, it can efficiently selectively update the rendering to track any changes in the tiddler or its dependents.
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The most important transformations are from `text/x-tiddlywiki` wikitext into `text/html` or `text/plain` but the engine is used throughout the system for other transformations, such as converting images for display in HTML, sanitising fragments of JavaScript, and processing CSS.
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The key feature of wikitext is the ability to include one tiddler within another (usually referred to as //transclusion//). For example, one could have a tiddler called //Disclaimer// that contains the boilerplate of a legal disclaimer, and then include it within lots of different tiddlers with the macro call `<<tiddler Disclaimer>>`. This simple feature brings great power in terms of encapsulating and reusing content, and evolving a clean, usable implementation architecture to support it efficiently is a key objective of the TiddlyWiki5 design.
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It turns out that the transclusion capability combined with the selective refreshing mechanism provides a good foundation for building TiddlyWiki's user interface itself. Consider, for example, the StoryMacro in its simplest form:
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{{{
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<<story story:MyStoryTiddler>>
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}}}
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The story macro looks for a list of tiddler titles in the tiddler `MyStoryTiddler`, and displays them in sequence. The subtle part is that subsequently, if `MyStoryTiddler` changes, the `<<story>>` macro is selectively re-rendered. So, to navigate to a new tiddler, code merely needs to add the name of the tiddler and a line break to the top of `MyStoryTiddler`:
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{{{
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var storyTiddler = store.getTiddler("MyStoryTiddler");
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store.addTiddler(new Tiddler(storyTiddler,{text: navigateTo + "\n" + storyTiddler.text}));
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}}}
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The mechanisms that allow all of this to work are fairly intricate. The sections below progressively build the key architectural concepts of TiddlyWiki5 in a way that should provide a good basis for exploring the code directly.
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